News and talk of interest to Russian Jews

July 24, 2014

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz poses in his office before the oil painting he commissioned of Mr. Reagan giving the Brandenburg Gate speech in which the president declared: "Tear down this wall." Melissa Golden for The Wall Street Journal

JRT: What kind of message, asked Texas Senator Ted Cruz on Wednesday, was President Obama sending Israel when he allowed the FAA to suspend flights to Israel, thereby completely isolating it? Even more than just giving Hamas a reason to celebrate their surface victory, did Mr. Obama launch the first truly significant economic boycott of Israel? As of now many European airlines have followed the FAA's lead, and with the announcement that the FAA has reversed its decision, it is important to note Mr. Cruz's observation that the damage may have already been done, regardless of what happens next.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, today questioned the Obama Administration’s decision to ban flights to Israel while, at the same time, announcing continuing aid that will be funneled to the terrorist organization, Hamas.

He added, “The facts suggest that President Obama has just used a federal regulatory agency to launch an economic boycott on Israel, in order to try to force our ally to comply with his foreign-policy demands.”

Sen. Cruz is asking the Obama Administration to answer five specific questions regarding the FAA’s decision to suspend flights to Israel.

Sen. Cruz’s full statement is below.

“Today, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that it was extending its ban on flights by U.S. carriers into Israel. The rationale was that because one Hamas-launch rocket had landed in a field one mile from Ben Gurion International Airport, the ‘potentially hazardous security situation created by the armed conflict between Israel and Gaza’ necessitated this extreme action that has so far cancelled some 160 flights and left tens of thousands stranded.

“Obviously, no one wants to place civilian travelers in harm’s way, and the recent downing of Malaysian Airways flight 17 by pro-Russian militants in Ukraine is a stark reminder of the dangers posed by regional unrest. But security concerns in Israel are hardly breaking news, and given the exceptional challenge Israel faces, Ben Gurion has rightly earned the reputation as one of the safest airports in the world due to the aggressive security measures implemented by the Israeli government.

“Given that some 2,000 rockets have been fired into Israel over the last six weeks, many of them at Tel Aviv, it seems curious to choose yesterday at noon to announce a flight ban, especially as the Obama Administration had to be aware of the punitive nature of this action.

“Tourism is an $11 billion industry for Israel, which is in the middle of a summer high season already seriously diminished by the conflict initiated by Hamas. Group tours have been cancelling at a 30% rate. This FAA flight ban may well represent a crippling blow to a key economic sector through both security concerns and worries that additional bans will down more flights and strand more passengers. It hardly matters if or when the ban is lifted. At this point, the damage may already be done.

“Even given the remarkable resilience and prosperity of its economy, Israel has always been vulnerable to economic blackmail. In the 1970s, we saw the Arab League boycott, which tried to punish any financial institution that did business with Israel.

“Today we have similar noxious efforts by the Boycott, Divest, Sanction or ‘BDS’ movement, which seeks to punish Israel for the fact that the militant terrorist elements embraced by the Palestinian Authority make any peace deal an intolerable security risk to Israel at this time. But the Obama Administration has refused to robustly denounce this effort to undermine our ally.

“Instead, Secretary of State John Kerry issued a veiled threat last February when he encouraged boycotts of Israel and said that absent serious Israeli concessions at the negotiating table, Israel’s economic prosperity was ‘not sustainable’ and ‘illusory.’ Secretary Kerry unfortunately reprised this theme just this April, when he threatened that Israel risked becoming an ‘apartheid state’ if Israel did not submit to his chosen solution to the Israel-Palestinian crisis.

“Taken in the context of Secretary Kerry’s comments, yesterday’s action by the FAA raises some serious questions:

Was this decision a political decision driven by the White House?

If the FAA’s decision was based on airline safety, why was Israel singled out, when flights would be permitted into Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen?

What was the FAA’s ‘safety’ analysis that led to prohibiting flights to Israel, while still permitting flights to Ukraine—where a commercial airline flight was just shot down with a BUK missile?

What specific communications occurred between the FAA and the White House? And the State Department? Why were any such communications necessary, if this was purely about airline safety?

Was this a safety issue, or was it using a federal regulatory agency to punish Israel to try to force them to comply with Secretary Kerry’s demand that Israel stop their military effort to take out Hamas’s rocket capacity?

“When Secretary Kerry arrived in Cairo this week his first act was to announce $47 million in additional aid to Gaza, which is in effect $47 million for Hamas. In short order, this travel ban was announced by the FAA. Aiding Hamas while simultaneously isolating Israel does two things. One, it helps our enemy. Two, it hurts our ally.

“Until these serious questions are answered, the facts suggest that President Obama has just used a federal regulatory agency to launch an economic boycott on Israel, in order to try to force our ally to comply with his foreign-policy demands.

July 17, 2014

JRT: With the news that an airplane was shot down over Ukraine this morning came denials from Ukraine, as well as accusations from Russia. Part of Ukraine's immediate case has been the face that they have no Buk missiles in the eastern part of the country, while Russian media reported just last month of rebel takeover of an anti-air installation, and the Russians have been getting testy when asked about them. Additionally, Russian "separatists" have apparently taken the downed plane's black box, and Russia Today (RT) is now reporting, in all seriousness, that Ukraine was likely targeting President Putin's plane and got the wrong one.

At this time, it is healthy to remember that one of these countries has a track record of shooting down civilian planes with no regard to human life. It is also useful to see how a real leader reacts in such situations. Above we present President Reagan's comments following the Soviet attack on KAL 007 in 1983.

JRT: David P. Goldman has written some fascinating analyses of the current Gaza war and the situation in general. Read his well articulated explanation why a one-state solution is the only viable future here.

It's like the old joke: Why do Jewish men die before their wives? Because they want to. Civilizations for the most part die because they no longer want to live. That is the nub of my 2011 bookHow Civilizations Die (and Why Islam Is Dying, Too).They cease to believe in their own future and distract themselves from the prospect of extinction as best they can. Hellenistic Greece was the first universal demographic disaster; it gave us prototypes of the steam engine and the computer (via Hero of Alexandria) as well as the modern literary forms. But even wealthy men exposed their daughters and the population imploded. When Aristotle taught that men naturally seek the good, the overwhelming preponderance of evidence had already turned against him. Most men seek nothingness. Soon the last surviving remnants of the classical world will disappear. In another generation, more people will speak Hebrew than Greek.

Hamas wants to die, obviously and visibly. That thought horrifies Westerners. As a number of Israeli commentators observe, Hamas doesn't particularly care about having a Palestinian State. It wants to destroy the Jewish State and is willing to die in the process. It wants to die in such a way that Israel will die, too. There is something utterly surreal to Hamas crowding civilians around military targets, and Israeli pilots declining to attack them...

Hamas, to be sure, proposes to die in an accelerated time frame and a particularly disgusting fashion, but it should be kept in mind that self-willed extinction is the norm. West of the Indus, Israel is the only survivor among the thousands of little nations that flourished between 10,000 BC and 600 AD. To be sure, there have been plenty of small tribes that wanted to live but were trampled by conquering hordes. The rule, however, is that civilizations die of their own disgust with life. Most of the industrial nations are dying, some very quickly. Most of the Muslim world would rather die than accommodate modernity (although some of it may choose to cease to be Islamic).

I do not mean to sound cruel, but the best thing you can do for victims of a dying culture is: Don't be one of them. Individuals who want to live have the option of changing cultures. I do not mean that Israel (or anyone else) should go about killing off enemies in order to satisfy their death wish. God forbid: life is still sacred to us even if it is repugnant to them. Neither do we have to commit suicide in order to accommodate our crazy neighbor's death-wish. We might try to talk him down from the roof, but we are entitled to step aside when he jumps. It is not in our power to persuade suicidal civilizations to carry on living. Ultimately it is our job to contain the damage to ourselves. We cannot help but accept some civilian deaths while engaging an enemy that seeks the maximum number of civilian casualties.

All of this is anathema to liberals, whose premise is that human agency can fix all problems. Enlightenment materialism posited a natural man who either sought self-preservation (Hobbes) or naturally pursued his own best interests (Locke) or was inherently good before corrupted by civilization (Rousseau). Satanic laughter from around the Levant drowns out the squeaky, thin voices of the Enlightenment. One no longer needs to read about it in books. The Middle East has become "How Civilizations Die: The Reality Show."...

May 15, 2014

Unlike Western policymakers and public-opinion molders, Arab leaders never doubted Mahmoud Abbas' core ideology. Therefore, they denyhim adequate financial support, while the Arab oil-producing countries provide Egypt multibillion dollar assistance. Similarly, during the 1980s, Saudi Arabia provided Afghanistan's Muslim rebels a billion dollars in annual aid, while extending Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yassir Arafat a mere $100 million annually, which was cut off following Arafat's and Abbas' betrayal of Kuwait in August 1990, when they collaborated with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's invasion of the sheikhdom. Moreover, Arab countries did not support the PLO and Hamas during their grand confrontations with Israel: the first and second intifadas, the Lebanon War and the series of wars in Gaza.

The Arab attitude towards Abbas is driven by Abbas' track record of intra-Arab subversion and terrorism. For example, during the late 1950s, Abbas and Arafat fled Egypt because of their subversive and terrorist activities, carried out as key Muslim Brotherhood operatives. In 1966, they fled Syria to Jordan, following their murders of a number of Syrian intelligence officers. In 1970, they were expelled from Jordan to Lebanon, following their attempt to topple Jordan's Hashemite regime, which ignited a brutal civil war. By 1975, they had plundered large parts of southern Lebanon, attempting to overthrow the central regime in Beirut, which triggered the Syrian invasion of Lebanon, a series of civil wars and the destruction of Lebanon. In 1990, Palestinian intelligence cells in Kuwait and Palestinian battalions in Iraq facilitated Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, which since 1960 had been the preferred safe haven for 300,000 Palestinian relatives and allies of Arafat and Abbas. As a result of that egregious betrayal, Kuwait expelled over 200,000 Palestinians. No Arab leader protested that expulsion.

While Egypt is cracking down on Hamas and its affiliates, Abbas -- an ally of Saddam, North Korea, Iran, Cuba and Venezuela -- provides Hamas with a vital tailwind.

On March 15, 2013, Abbas, the Russian-speaking graduate of KGB courses and Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, the former steward of PLO ties with the ruthless East European communist regimes, and (since 1993) the lead PLO negotiator with Hamas, toldRussia Today TV: "As far as I'm concerned there is no difference between the policies of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas." The frequent attempts to form the PLO-Hamas axis are based on their common strategic goal, while maintaining their tactical differences. Abbas' strategic goal (the eradication of the Jewish state) and tactics (gradually, via diplomacy and terrorism) are specified in the 2009 Fatah platform, the PLO's 1974 Phased, Step-by-Step Planand the 1964 PLO Covenant(two thirds of its articles are dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state). Both terror organizations are chaired by Abbas, who -- according to the 1993 Oslo Accord -- derives his power as the chairman of the Palestinian Authority from the PLO, which is the highest Palestinian authority. Fatah was established in 1959 and the PLO in 1964, before Israel reasserted itself in Judea and Samaria and before the establishment of the first modern-day Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria. Thus, the strategic goal of Abbas has been directed at pre-1967 Israel. On November 29, 2012, Abbas toldthe U.N. General Assembly that "occupation" and "injustice" began in 1948, not in 1967.

Abbas highlights the claim of return to the "1948 occupied areas," which explains his insistence to represent and release Israeli Arab terrorists. Being a devout Muslim, and a former top Muslim Brotherhood activist, Abbas adheres to cardinal principles of Islam. For example, Waqf, the supposedly divinely-ordained Muslim right over any area previously controlled by Muslims, including the Land of Israel. Also, the Hudaybiyyah Treaty, which considers agreements concluded with "infidels" a pragmatic, provisional agreement to be breached whenever possible to bring the infidel" to submission, and not to peaceful coexistence.

To achieve the strategic goal, Abbas has spoken softly, while carrying a horrendous stick of hate-education in schools, mosques and media, brainwashing Palestinian society: the most effective production-line of terrorists. One's education is the most authentic reflection of one's values, ideology and strategic goal. Hence, the popularityof the anti-Semitic "Mein Kampf" and "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" on the Palestinian street. Thus, the Abbas-driven Palestinian conventional wisdom: It's not the size -- but the existence -- of the Jewish state that is the crux of the conflict with Israel.

The central role played by terrorism in shaping Abbas' worldview is highlighted by his demand to release Palestinian terrorists, who deliberately and systematically murdered, maimed and intimidated Israeli civilians; by providing monthly allowances to families of terrorists; and by naming streets, squares and soccer tournaments after terrorists; and by featuring terrorists as role-model to Palestinians.

Germany and Japan were transformed from hateful -- to peaceful -- countries by uprooting hate-education and terror regimes, not by engaging and funding them.

Should the U.S. taxpayer continue funding the hate-education system of Abbas, who caused the flight of Christians from the Bethlehem area, and is known as "Mr. 20%" for his corruption?

Should Israel accept Abbas in view of the ferocity of Hamas terrorism? Only if Jack the Ripper's vicious style made the Boston Strangler an acceptable member of society.

Rabbi Leib Scheiner was whimsically but lovingly known in Greater Boston as "the supermarket rabbi." This quiet man, who was a member of the Shaloh House synagogue and community since its inception in Brighton, and who taught for decades at the New England Hebrew Academy - Lubavitch Yeshiva - was a great Torah scholar. But Rabbi Scheiner's love of G-d and Torah was matched by a different passion - a boundless love for his fellow Jews, especially those who weren't lucky enough to know about the Torah.

Every Thursday, Rabbi Scheiner would take a long shopping list to Shaw's of Stop and Shop to buy food for Shabbos. He would return home with an equally long list of Jews he's met while shopping whom he invited to his house for Shabbos. Fascinatingly, people who wouldn't dream of accepting invitations from a complete stranger nevertheless responded to this rabbi whose face radiated kindness. Lives were transformed as a result. People who had no acquaintance with Torah grew to love it, and those who shied away from their Judaism became proud Jews.

On Sunday, May 18, at 4pm, the Shaloh House community will be completing the writing of a new Torah scroll in Rabbi Scheiner's memory. Shaloh House invites all members of the Boston Jewish community to join in the event, and partake in this project in any way they could.

For more information regarding this event and the Torah scroll, click here.

We easily forget how fascism works: as a bright and shining alternative to the mundane duties of everyday life, as a celebration of the obviously and totally irrational against good sense and experience. Fascism features armed forces that do not look like armed forces, indifference to the laws of war in theirapplication to people deemed inferior, the celebration of “empire” after counterproductive land grabs. Fascism means the celebration of the nude male form, the obsession with homosexuality, simultaneously criminalized and imitated. Fascism rejects liberalism and democracy as sham forms of individualism, insists on the collective will over the individual choice, and fetishizes the glorious deed. Because the deed is everything and the word is nothing, words are only there to make deeds possible, and then to make myths of them. Truth cannot exist, and so history is nothing more than a political resource. Hitler could speak of St. Paul as his enemy,Mussolini could summon the Roman emperors. Seventy years after the end of World War II, we forgot how appealing all this once was to Europeans, and indeed that only defeat in war discredited it. Today these ideas are on the rise in Russia, a country that organizes its historical politics around the Soviet victory in that war, and the Russian siren song has a strange appeal in Germany, the defeated country that was supposed to have learned from it.

The pluralist revolution in Ukraine came as a shocking defeat to Moscow, and Moscow has delivered in return an assault on European history. Even as Europeans follow with alarm or fascination the spread of Russian special forces from Crimea through Donetsk and Luhansk, Vladimir Putin’s propagandists seek to draw Europeans into an alternative reality, an account of history rather different from what most Ukrainians think, or indeed what the evidence can bear. Ukraine has never existed in history, goes the claim, or if it has, only as part of a Russian empire. Ukrainians do not exist as a people; at most they are Little Russians. But if Ukraine and Ukrainians do not exist, then neither does Europe or Europeans. If Ukraine disappears from history, then so does the site of the greatest crimes of both the Nazi and Stalinist regimes. If Ukraine has no past, then Hitler never tried to make an empire, and Stalin never exercised terror by hunger.

Ukraine does of course have a history. The territory of today’s Ukraine can very easily be placed within every major epoch of the European past. Kiev’s history of east Slavic statehood begins in Kiev a millennium ago. Its encounter with Moscow came after centuries of rule from places like Vilnius and Warsaw, and the incorporation of Ukrainian lands into the Soviet Union came only after military and political struggles convinced the Bolsheviks themselves that Ukraine had to be treated as a distinct political unit. After Kiev was occupied a dozen times, the Red Army was victorious, and a Soviet Ukraine was established as part of the new Soviet Union in 1922.

JRT: In 1942 a Soviet submarine in the Mediterranean Sea torpedoed the Struma, a ship filled with Jewish immigrants hoping to reach Palestine, killing 768 Jews on board. David Stoliar was the lone survivor of this horrific event. A 19-year-old boy from Romania, Stoliar managed to stay alive by holding onto a floating fragment of the boat for more than 24 hours, before finally being rescued by the Turkish coast guard, who subsequently imprisoned him.

...At last, on February 23, 1942, the Struma was towed out to sea by the Turkish coast guard. "The police ordered us to go down to the lower deck, where we were crowded like sardines in a can. We resisted and threw several policemen into the Istanbul sea. Backup arrived and their people beat us with clubs. They cut the anchor and towed the Struma outside the Istanbul port, toward the deep Black Sea. The ship was left without a working engine, anchor, radio, food or water," Stoliar says.

At daybreak on February 24 the ship was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine, which thought it was an enemy ship. Stoliar survived by hanging on to a chunk of wood that had detached from the deck and thanks to the thick wool coat he had on, which protected him from the freezing cold. Stoliar remained in the water all night. Help arrived only after 24 hours: A Turkish fishing boat pulled him out of the water and brought him to shore. Turkish policemen subjected him to a demeaning interrogation and arrested him. He was only released several weeks later, penniless, without papers, in a foreign country. With the help of the local Jewish community in Istanbul he got transit papers and crossed the border into Lebanon, from where he made his way to Haifa.

The Struma in the Istanbul harbor.

A year later Stoliar enlisted in the British Army and saw action in North Africa. In 1945 he got married at a synagogue in Cairo. Upon his release from the British Army, he and his wife returned to Israel, and he joined the Israel Defense Forces. In the War of Independence he fought as a machine gunner in the north. Later he worked for an oil company, which sent him to Japan with his wife and their young son. After his wife's death, he remarried, to an American woman, and moved at the end of the 1970s to the U.S., where he still lives today, in Bend, Oregon. "Here in America, the Struma is another footnote to history," Stoliar says. However, he adds, "my time of rage has passed. Like it is written, 'to everything there is a season.' For me, now it is time to mourn, to heal, to embrace, and to convey my memories to the next generation so they will remember and not forget."

David Stoliar, the lone survivor of a 1942 Russian torpedo attack that killed 768 Jews, died May 1 at his longtime residence in Bend. He was 91.

Although regarded as a historical figure who was featured in at least three books and one movie, Stoliar almost never talked about the incident long-known among Jews as the “Holocaust at Sea.”

“I’d never heard him talk about it until we had been married for two years,” Marda Stoliar, his second wife, said from her home Sunday night during a telephone interview. “I found out later that he never told his first wife, either, and they were married for 17 years.”

The 10 weeks that 19-year-old Stoliar spent aboard the doomed Struma and later, upon his rescue, in a Turkish prison, were deeply scarring, she said. Each time he’d consent to be interviewed on the subject, whether by officials from The Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., or journalists, the next week he would awaken screaming every night.

“That total experience, as terrible as it was, claimed just 72 days of his life,” Marda Stoliar said. “He went on to live an amazing life, one someone could only wish for.”

...Her husband was born Oct. 31, 1922, in Chisinau, Romania, which today is Moldova. His parents divorced not long after but agreed that conditions were getting intense enough in pre-World War II Europe that young David should leave.

His father bought him a ticket on the Struma, an already derelict old cattle boat. It sailed in December 1941 from a port on the Black Sea. It reached its first stop on the way to Palestine already plagued by engine trouble.

Turkish officials ordered all 769 passengers to remain aboard and ultimately refused them transit. The boat was towed into the Black Sea and set adrift. Within hours, a Soviet submarine prowling the waters for German or Italian ships torpedoed the Struma. Only Stoliar survived.

“If David had been a firebrand, a political Jew, an opportunistic man anxious for celebrity and all it bestows, the world might have known more about the Struma,” wrote Alan Guggenheim, a close family friend. “However, he was not that kind of person.”...

Michael Douglas isn’t the only celebrity whose child got bar mitzvahed recently. Lisa Kudrow dropped by Conan this week to talk about her new movie Neighbors, and was surprised to find that host Conan O’Brien, a longtime friend, had a bone to pick with her. He wanted to know why he wasn’t invited to her son’s bar mitzvah.

He wasn’t invited, Kudrow explains, because no one was invited. The Jewish actress wasn’t even there when it happened. It was what she calls a “drive-by bar mitzvah.”

A drive-by bar mitzvah, it turns out, is both less and more frightening than it sounds. Her 15-year-old son was at the mall one day when he was approached by what Kudrow guesses were Chabad representatives, who asked if he was Jewish. He said half, they asked which half, he said his mother’s side, and they asked if he had been bar mitzvahed. He hadn’t. Did he want to? Sure.

Kudrow describes the exchange with a mix of amusement and incredulousness, explaining that the men put tefillin and a yarmulke on him, had him recite a prayer, then took a picture for him to show his mother.

While I’m not entirely certain this constitutes a bar mitzvah (Don’t you have to be called to the Torah? Aren’t there usually giveaways?), Kudrow seemed to be fine with the whole thing. The best part of the story, though, is that when Kudrow told her relatives about the impromptu rite of passage, they started sending her son checks. Back to the mall he goes.

A demand to strengthen the anti-religious campaign among Jews in connection with the approaching Passover holiday is voiced today in the Yiddish Communist papers, “Der Stern” of Charkov and the Moscow “Emes.”

The “Stern” urges that anti-Passover meetings be arranged “in order to explain how comical the Passover ritual is.” The paper complains that Jewish artisans are under the influence of the religious propaganda conducted by rabbis and are even contributing toward a fund to supply the poor Jews with matzoth. They are also organizing cooperative matzoth bakeries to provide matzoth for themselves and others.

The “Emes” states that in connection with the approaching Passover, religious sentiment have been strengthened among the Jews in the Ukraine and White Russia. In the city Orsha, a number of Jewish stores are now beginning to keep closed on Saturdays. The number of Chedarim (religious schools) has greatly increased lately in White Russia, the paper complains.

April 12, 2014

JRT: Passover will begin at sundown on Monday, April 14, and ending on Tuesday, April 22. The holiday is about the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt, but even more than that, it is about the liberation of each Jew from his own personal letter "enslavement." We present a letter written by the Lubavitcher Rebbe in which he discusses the meaning of true liberation.

The festival of Passover calls for early and elaborate preparations to make the Jewish home fitting for the great festival. It is not physical preparedness alone that is required of us, but also spiritual preparedness—for in the life of the Jew the physical and spiritual are closely linked together, especially in the celebration of our Sabbath and festivals.

On Passover we celebrate the liberation of the Jewish people from Egyptian slavery and, together with it, the liberation from, and negation of the ancient Egyptian system and way of life, the "abominations of Egypt." Thus we celebrate our physical liberation together with our spiritual freedom. Indeed, there cannot be one without the other; there can be no real freedom without accepting the precepts of our Torah guiding our daily life; pure and holy life eventually leads to real freedom.

It is said: "In every generation each Jew should see himself as though he personally had been liberated from Egypt." This is to say, that the lesson of Passover has always a timely message for the individual Jew. The story of Passover is the story of the special Divine Providence which alone determines the fate of our people. What is happening in the outside world need not affect us; we might be singled out for suffering, G‑d forbid, amid general prosperity, and likewise singled out for safety amid a general plague or catastrophe. The story of our enslavement and liberation of which Passover tells us, give ample illustration of this. For the fate of our people is determined by its adherence to G‑d and His Prophets.

This lesson is emphasized by the three principal symbols of the Seder, concerning which our Sages said that unless the Jew explains their significance he has not observed the Seder fittingly: Pesach [the Paschal Offering], Matzohand Moror [bitter herbs]. Using these symbols in their chronological order and in accordance with the Haggadah explanation, we may say: the Jews avoid Moror (bitterness of life) only through Pesach (G‑d's special care 'passing over' and saving the Jewish homes even in the midst of the greatest plague), and Matzoh—then the very catastrophe and the enemies of the Jews will work for the benefit of the Jews, driving them in great haste out of "Mitzraim" [Egypt], the place of perversion and darkness, and placing them under the beam of light and holiness.

One other important thing we must remember. The celebration of the festival of freedom must be connected with the commandment "You shall relate it to your son." The formation and existence of the Jewish home, as of the Jewish people as a whole, is dependent upon the upbringing of the young generation, both boys and girls: the wise and the wicked (temporarily), the simple and the one who knows not what to ask. Just as we cannot shirk our responsibility towards our child by the excuse that "my child is a wise one; he will find his own way in life therefore no education is necessary for him"; so we must not despair by thinking "the child is a wicked one; no education will help him." For, all Jewish children, boys and girls, are "G‑d's children" and it is our sacred duty to see to it that they all live up to their above mentioned title; and this we can achieve only through a kosher Jewish education, in full adherence to G‑d's Torah. Then we all will merit the realization of our ardent hopes: "In the next year may we be free; in the next year may we be in Jerusalem!"